In cooperation with Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, this exhibition is exploring themes of human identity - the topic of "self" in the most varied of situations and visual expressions. This international project brings together works from Christian Boltanski, Gottfried Helnwein, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Marlene Dumas, Bruce Nauman and others.

In 1971/72 Gerhard Richter created a series of 48 iconic portraits of men that influenced Modernity, in a photorealistic manner based on black and white photographs in encyclopedias. Exactly 20 years later, in 1991/92 Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein replied with a cycle of 48 portraits that depict exclusively women of historic influence. In contrast to Gerhard Richter’s men in gray, Helnwein painted his women in fiery red. Both Helnwein's and Gerhard Richter's works, which are part of the collection of the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, are being shown together face to face for the first time as the centerpiece of the exhibition Undeniable Me, at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague.

A catalogue will be issued will with the Prague exhibition with a foreword by the Director of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg Dr. Markus Brüderlin, as well as texts from exhibition curators Julie Wallner and Holger Broeker for Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg and Petr Nedoma for Galerie Rudolfinum, and the catalogue will also contain reproductions of almost all of the exhibited works and the usual information about each artist.

Identity is certainly one of the most complex concepts affecting, without exception, every human being. Then depicting of human figures, especially faces, closely relates to the need to express oneself and take up a position in relation to “me” and to the surrounding world, itself implies to fully set foot into the field of identity. The exhibition focuses on the reflection and changes in the perception and identity in contemporary art. Its open concept creates a network of relations that bring the possibility of new reading and interpretation of both the works themselves, and the given theme. The statement “Undeniably Me”, which was chosen as the name of the entire exhibition, explicitly leads to the entire problem, which is very contemporary in the broader context of current events where shifts in self-reflection in relation to the outside world are quite clearly visible and widely discussed. The core of the exhibition is the concept of curators of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg Julie Wallner and Holger Broeker, created mainly on the basis of the Museum’s collections. Thanks to the excellent relationships between the two organizing institutions, it was possible to create a new Prague version of the exhibition – compared to the original, the exhibition has been principally extended by a number of substantial works on the subject from both public and private collections throughout Europe.

The theme of “Me” is on various levels and locations spread-out from the now iconic installation “Menschlich” from Christian Boltansky – the covering of the walls of the room with hundreds of black and white photographs of people who disappeared long ago, to the “Memory Lapse” a video from Dutch artist Fiona Tan, which captures, using a very impressive, almost a film method the problem of the loss of one’s own self and forgetting oneself as a result of Alzheimer’s disease. In the space between these two fields of human existence, the selected artists explore in various positions the theme of Me, from self-projection in film roles in the world-famous images of American photographer Cindy Sherman, through ironic commentary on racial issues in the videos of Bruce Nauman, Rineke Dijkstra’s extremely sensitive portraits of ordinary people perceiving the transformation of identity in adolescence, questions of identity determined by belonging to a particular social group from Richard Bellingham, Marlene Dumas’s vibrant paintings on the theme of sensitive questions related to gender issues, double portraits from the Hidden Image series by Jiří David, the question of the loss of identity in the Communist regime of North Korea, in addition referring to the dehumanization of work in a developed Western society in monumental photographs by Andreas Gursky, the fictitious portraits of Thomas Ruff,

to the completely unique work that forms the climax of the entire exhibition – an iconic set from German painter Gerhard Richter entitled “48 Portraits” depicting 48 men based on the black and white reproductions in encyclopaedias. On the opposite wall the counterpart, also called "48 Portraits" by Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, showing 48 women in monochromatic red.

The exhibitions also includes masterful drawings of faces referring to the still hidden identity of babies by American artist Robert Longo, a series of drawings entitled “Where am I?” by Russian conceptualists Viktor Pivovarov, a video by Garry Hill, as well as other works by Gerhard Richter entitled “Onkel Rudi”, whose importance in the context of Czech origin arises from the Lidice collection

By its broad range, the exhibition attempts to summarize and mutually connect a series of works, which themselves were created at different times and places, but now crucially pertain to the interpretation of the given theme through the complexity of their expressions.